It looks as though the 30 day early rising trial I’m doing over at Crystals Quest is starting to merge with the LOA lessons I’ve learnt in my 30 day trials here.  Not only am I finding that my health is making leaps for the better (since I accidentally gave up coffee) but I discovered a post on a forum I like, offering a 30 day group manifestation trial.  It had already been going for about 10 days, but I still jumped in and asked to join.  The group intention - which did give me butterflies until I worked on getting rid of them - was to manifest $20,000 for each person in the group.  Some already have.  For many, that was a small amount (hence I decided this was a group I wanted to spend more time around, to change my own attitudes in that direction).

Well, the day after I signed up I won a competition online, having my name drawn for a prize.  Not sure the value of that.  I don’t know if it counts, but in the week before I found this post (while it was already going) I had won a $200 gift voucher elsewhere, as well as discovered some unclaimed money that boosted the tally further.

Now it’s seeming like luck is definitely something that ties in nicely with manifestation.

Would you like to see this as another 30 day trial, testing out methods for making yourself luckier?  Either email me back or use the comments option here to let me know, and I’ll decide January’s topic based on your response…

Technorati Tags: 30 day trial, Health, Luck, money

It doesn’t hurt that even in the first module (which has a surprising amount of stuff to go through!) there’s a straight up push to get us going into the practical planning stages.  By the time I finish this first lot, I’ll have laid the foundations to actually go through a launch of my own.  A little one, I’m thinking, to practise on.  It’s all very exciting.

Of course, this is just one payment of six.  I wonder what would have happened if I’d gone for the ‘up front’ option? <grin>

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, coincidence, Law of Attraction, leap of faith, PLF 2.1, Product Launch Formula 2, synchronicity

I felt good about that decision.  It felt like a step forward, towards clarity.

The funny thing is, though, that having done that, I’ve spent the last week having jobs just about thrown at me from all directions!  I browse the web and the sites I surf suddenly have ads for jobs in my local area.  I call up about a technical issue at work, and in the process of working with them to resolve it end up getting an offer to shift across there.  Even helping a colleague out with a different software issue, and then feeding back to their specialist area I got another.  Now I don’t want them, they’re coming thick and fast!

I suspect that this means I’m making some progress, and that having clarified my issues around work and what I eventually want to achieve, maybe all the tests that were queued up for me are just being moved out of the way.  It’s very funny, though.  After spending so much of my life as a jobseeker, NOW I discover the secret to getting job offers galore is to decide you don’t want them and start knocking them back!

Technorati Tags: clarity, goals, jobseeker, Law of Attraction, LOA

How to specify a default image for lead_image and secondary_image and
How to make the home page show posts from only one category.

I know, this is another off-topic post but I’ve had so many people write in to me wanting to know about the tweaks I’ve been doing for this theme that I just thought I’d put it out there.
[grin] Maybe it’s how I’m going to do some more ‘attraction’ of readers???

Anyway, I’ve been wanting to set up the theme for a while so that if I didn’t have the time (or inspiration) to create a custom image for lead_image and secondary_image, the page would revert to using a default one. Plus, of course, it would mean I could occasionally post remotely from places where I didn’t have access to ftp and image software. Turns out it’s not actually that hard.

The line of code that looks for the image to use on your home page is, funnily enough, home.php. (There’s a similar entry under index.php but it only looks for secondary images, so I suspect that’s called when you’ve got some kind of page navigation plugin that lets you go back to previous entries. I put the fix in there too just to be certain.)

You’re looking for the code:

<?php $top_query = new WP_Query(’showposts=1′); ?>
<?php while($top_query->have_posts()) : $top_query->the_post(); $first_post = $post->ID; ?>
<div class=”post” id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”>
<div class=”main-post-bg”>
<p class=”post-comments”><?php comments_popup_link(’No Comments’, ‘1 Comment’, ‘% Comments’); ?></p>
<?php $image = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘lead_image’, true); ?>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” title=”<?php the_title(); ?>”><img width=”593″ src=”<?php echo $image; ?>” alt=”" /></a>
<div id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>” class=”post”>
<div class=”main-post-bg”><a title=”<?php the_title(); ?>” href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”><img src=”<?php echo $image; ?>” alt=”" width=”593″ /></a>

The line in there that calls the image is <?php $image = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘lead_image’, true); ?>.  You can add in a string just after the last semicolon that tells it what to look for if there is no ‘lead_image’ specified by changing it to:

<?php $image = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘lead_image’, true); $image = $image ? $image : ‘../images/default_img.jpg’; ?>

Of course, you’d change the path to whatever points to your default picture, and make sure it’s sized properly (593 x 225px).

Then you need to do something similar to point to your default ’secondary_image’.  It looks just like the above line, but about 15 lines down and says ’secondary_image’ instead of ‘lead_image’.  That one will need to be sized 293×150, if you’re still using the unstandard default sizing.  To make it easy, here’s a cut and paste again:

<?php $image = get_post_meta($post->ID, ’secondary_image’, true); $image = $image ? $image : ‘../images/default_img2.jpg’; ?>

And finally, for those that have asked me how I made my home page show only selected posts, I created a category called ‘Featured’ and only those will show up on the front page.  It was my workaround for posts where I didn’t have images - I just wouldn’t assign them to that category and the pictures wouldn’t be needed.  How?  The line:

<?php $top_query = new WP_Query(’showposts=1′); ?>
…and further down…
<?php query_posts(’showposts=15′); ?>

got changed to:

<?php $top_query = new WP_Query(’showposts=1&category_name=Featured’); ?>
…and…
<?php query_posts(’showposts=15&category_name=Featured’); ?>

Technorati Tags: customizing, default images, home page category, scripting, the Unstandard, Wordpress theme

So, now that work is seeing the potential of what I can offer in a super productive day, I’m facing another problem. I’m getting called in to a lot more meetings and being asked for a lot more input. It’s great on one level to get that recognition, but at the same time it’s making my workday hours creep outside the borders a bit more, and it’s a bit of a challenge to remember that the job is NOT meant to be the all consuming god of my life; in fact I have other dreams and plans outside of work that it’s starting to eat into. This is where I’ve fallen down a few times in my life - setting and standing behind boundaries.

This week is going to be really challenging, since we’re down a supervisor and I’ll be backup for a few things he normally does. Not an issue in terms of skills, just in terms of time. I’m either going to have to get really really efficient somehow somewhere I’ve not yet streamlined (I don’t think there’s anything left that I haven’t tweaked already) or put in a few more hours. On the bright side, I will get those hours back down the road, but that’s not the point. It’s a learning experience for me to remember to put myself up higher in the priority list. I think that’s one a lot of women have trouble with, and I know I’m not alone, but even so…

… wish me luck?

Third option I just realised, I might just have to work out what to drop off and let some things go from my workload - which is perfectly in line with the 80/20 philosophy of the book! Hmm. Maybe I’m in more of a learning curve than I thought!

Technorati Tags: 4 hour workweek, dayjob, dreams, goals, lifehack, priorities, work

Meanwhile, the tips I’m most getting pushed to follow are to start thinking of myself earning two or three times as much as I’m getting now. That one’s not an issue, I’ve done that repeatedly before and it’s worked every time. Could be interesting to see how much faster it works (6 months is the record) with the other foundations in place first. I’m going to set up a ‘wealth fountain’ just like Steve has (another post I stumbled on, just as I was thinking of opening and setting up the feng shui fountain I got from my Mum). Finally, while I’ve had a treasure chest in my room for a while, it’s been hidden. I keep seeing bigger and bigger tip jars and other glass receptacles everywhere I go and I think the message is that I need to have that kind of symbol of wealth out on display, not hidden in fear of losing it (definitely not something I want to affirm, although I didn’t think of it that way until I started considering putting it out and the fears came up).

I finally got hold of Tim Ferriss’ book “The Four Hour Workweek” and oh boy was that a fun read. It took four days, but the implementation is going to take a bit longer. In the very first chapter there was a heading “Ask for forgiveness, not permission” and it just clicked - that’s the approach I need to take to finally shift away from the victim mentality left over from the workplace bullying I dealt with over the last few years. I’m bearing it in mind, and the difference in how powerful and self-directing I feel is incredible!

It truly is a book for the new paradigm, and the first people to jump onto riding the wave he talks about are really and truly going to be the magnates of the next millennium. If you haven’t got hold of it, please do yourself a favour and grab it - but even more importantly, read it with an open mind! If you hear yourself thinking “that wouldn’t work in my situation” or something similar, think again. The only rules with power over us are the ones we choose to accept. Even the most apparently stringent organisation (and I’ve worked in government, so I know) can be brought around to flex the rules if they have enough reason to. In fact, probably the most common complaint about government departments IS how they bend those rules that are supposed to apply to everyone. The key word to remember is “interpretation”. That, and what I said above: the only rules with power over us, are the ones we choose to accept.

But back to the topic. I’ve had a couple of inspirational ideas I’m plotting out and planning on following up, and things are getting so exciting. The dreams I put in my workbook are starting to seem more achievable, and the ways I’m getting inspired to chase them could deliver them way faster than I would have thought possible. There really are no restrictions on the possibilities once you open your mind up to them. Anything IS possible. It’s amazing, inspiring, humbling and mind-boggling all at the same time. I have to say, though, that the absolute key to achieving with LOA is definitely taking action. All the inspiration and visualisation in the world will serve you nothing if you don’t follow up on it. That’s my learning process, and the bottleneck that holds all my goals in check. Even small actions, I’m finding, can have fantastically big results - not least in shifting the inertia so you can take the next, slightly bigger action.

Once the ball starts rolling, though, I gotta say, this is one helluva ride!

Technorati Tags: attracting money, Law of Attraction, manifestation, releasing limitations, Using the Law of Attraction

The site may not be attracting any money yet (hey, it’s a learning experience, great fun to do anyway, and it’s working wonders for my relationship with my car mad boyfriend) but somehow it seems I am. I’ve been trying to work on allowing abundance flow to me without being fixed on how, and all of a sudden there’s money showing up literally at my feet! I’ve gone from finding the occasional 5c coin, (maybe once a year) to now finding them fairly regularly, like weekly or more often; running across a 20c coin last week; (he wasn’t impressed but I told him it was a BIG improvement on finding 5c, 400% better in fact. He gave up arguing with me) to discovering I got an extra dollar back in change, and this afternoon I came across a literal shower of coins someone had dropped and somehow nobody else had noticed, even though it was on one of the major streets of our town. Ended up being 40c, but finding 5 coins, some of them double what I used to, is definitely a sign I’m getting better. Oh, and before you ask, there was nobody in sight so there was no way I could have found the dropper anyway. I had an unexpected windfall last week that cleared in the bank this week, just in time for all the rates and everything, mortgage rates have dropped and are set to drop a few more times before the end of the year, they say, and all of a sudden it seems like the trickle is starting to punch a hole through that dam!

Oh, and on the seats thing - I did it again today. Even more amazing, I got a seat EXACTLY where I pictured it, all to myself, in the very last carriage. That’s usually the one that fills up most, with people who are running late jumping on to it last minute at every station. I could hardly believe it when I saw, but I thoroughly enjoyed it all the way home! LOA is SO COOL!!!!

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